Why do today’s leaders seem so … small?

West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famous Warschauer Kniefall — “Warsaw Genuflection” — on December 7, 1970.

Anniversaries of events surrounding great leaders always provoke unkind comparisons with the performances and personas of their successors. The mists of time erase their weaknesses and bathe their achievements in the nostalgic, golden glow of memory.

The 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination evoked such a mood. It was especially strong as his tragic fall is usually rolled together with the equally painful deaths of his brother, Robert, and of Martin Luther King Jr. only a few years later. All three men left behind the ache of missed opportunity.

We choose to forget that Kennedy got not a single historic piece of legislation passed, waffled on both Cuba and Vietnam and, perhaps like Barack Obama, was somewhat better at moving audiences than at driving government. Robert Caro’s magisterial, soon-to-be five-volume audit of Lyndon Johnson’s life has forced those of us old enough to remember hating him for the war in Vietnam to step back and reconsider his accomplishments.

Assessments of leadership are rarely set in stone. History’s judgments force painful edits of the reputations of the mighty and the maligned. The lens of one’s own experience affects one’s vision of greatness. For the Polish, Winston Churchill’s acquiescence to the murder of tens of thousands of their countrymen by quiet agreement with Josef Stalin at Yalta will forever mute the colours of his reputation. Canadians and Australians who know of Churchill’s role in decreeing the appalling and meaningless sacrifice of their young men — at Gallipoli in the First World War and in Hong Kong during the Second World War — will never see him as grateful Englishmen always will.

Yet there are standards — and standard-bearers — and we’re right measure our leaders against them. It’s hard — in Canada, the United States, Europe, Africa and much of Asia — to look at today’s important government and business leaders and see people who meet the test of history.

The rationalizations are many. Trying times impose greatness on otherwise ordinary leaders. Peace rarely makes for great leadership; conflict does. Good times merely require good leadership. But these are simply rationalizations of failure.

Would South Africa not be a better and happier place now if Nelson Mandela had served more than a single term as its president? Mandela’s recent passing reminded the world that a onetime prisoner, jailed for 27 years, became the father of his country and the democratically elected president of a free South Africa. And it reminded Canadians of Brian Mulroney’s campaign of conscience against apartheid. Canada was the first country Mandela visited after his release in early 1990; our Parliament was the first one he addressed as a free man.

Can one see a single Churchillian gene, or fragment of Thatcherite DNA, in the political makeup of David Cameron? Does Angela Merkel’s hesitant physicist-housewife leadership rank her anywhere near Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt or Helmut Kohl? It is preposterous to mention François Hollande’s name in the same sentence as Charles de Gaulle or François Mitterrand?

The respected students of leadership — scholars like Warren Bennis, Peter Drucker, Antony Beevor and Doris Kearns Goodwin — all agree that leaders are made, not born. Yes, your odds at the brass ring are better if you are English-speaking, tall, handsome, white, male and eloquent. But Martin Luther King was only 5-foot-6. Lee Kuan Yew is not eloquent. Indira Gandhi was far from handsome. All three were non-white. Greatness is available to all. So why is it so scarce today?

Part of the reason, as Churchill acidly put it, is that “it is hard for a nation to look up to leaders whose ears are to the ground.” Today’s marketing-driven political and corporate leadership style emphasizes incremental change, cautious initiatives, and ears firmly attuned to the latest focus group research.

As Churchill acidly put it, ‘it is hard for a nation to look up to leaders whose ears are to the ground.’ Today’s marketing-driven political and corporate leadership style emphasizes incremental change, cautious initiatives, and ears firmly attuned to the latest focus group research.

Another crippling contribution to the scarcity of leadership is the decline of deference, the slow erosion of faith in institutions and in society itself, the apparently endless rise of social anomie and disengagement in much of the developed world among the young. In the 1960s, we thought it so very clever to wear buttons that read, “What if they gave a war and no one came?” The underlying message of our cynical stance was, “No leader deserves your trust. Don’t listen to them.” And it’s less than a lifetime ago that such a breakdown in confidence led to the bloodiest chapters in an already bloody 20th century.

Not to be credited is the finger-wagging at traditional journalism, video games, and the impact of digital technologies and contemporary social media. It’s the trope of many a grumpy aging progressive, ironically joined by knuckle-draggers like Bill O’Reilly: Nobody reads anymore, young people don’t care, and we are rotting our collective minds with salacious trivia. The same was said about coffee houses three centuries ago, gin houses two centuries ago, and opium dens in the 19th century. Each of those generations was marked by dozens of great leaders, despite the frivolous temptations of their era.

Nor can the argument that good times merely require basic management skills be given any credence today. The list of causes, issues and countries desperate for strong, principled leadership remains too long to even contemplate such a weak excuse.

Whether it’s carbon limits, reducing income inequality or solving the Israel-Palestine conflict, leadership will involve strong persuasion about some unappealing changes. Former U.S. First Lady Rosalynn Carter put it well: “A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.” Given her insight, it must have been painful for her to see her husband fail at it.

It is hard to think of a more incremental and cautious exponent of manager-as-leader than our current prime minister. Stephen Harper’s career has been built on avoiding anything big, potentially divisive or transformational. This leadership strategy has worked beautifully for him and for his new party, but it is hard to see history being impressed by his contribution to transforming Canada’s weaknesses into strengths, to taking us where we ought to be. (In fairness, in negotiating the Canada-Europe Trade Agreement, he has delivered on a big idea — possibly a transformational one.)

Obama risks harsh judgment for the opposite shortcoming: promising much and failing to perform. The fiasco that was the healthcare rollout was not only a failure of management, but a failure of real political leadership. Obama’s achievements in energizing and engaging disaffected black, Hispanic and young Americans by the millions now risks being seen merely as proof of eloquence. Speechmaking can be the foundation of great leadership, but not its content.

Leadership is not always about a conscious strategy of change, methodically executed. Sometimes it is framed by an incident or an inspiration born of character and experience. When West German Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt ventured on his first trip to Poland — to meet the survivors of a people more savagely crushed more often by his German forefathers than any other — he knew history’s expectations for him in that moment.

On that cold, grey afternoon in December 1970, Brandt slowly approached the monument to those who had been murdered by German soldiers in the uprising of Polish Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. It’s ancient history today — it was only 27 years in the past then. He was surrounded by a mix of local officials and ordinary citizens, many of them old enough to have witnessed the atrocities first-hand. In the famous photograph of that day, you see on their assembled faces combinations of doubt, shock and even happiness, as they witnessed the unbelievable.

The leader of the hated German nation fell suddenly and without warning to his knees, his hands clenched in front of him, head abjectly bowed, his pained gaze unbroken by a single word. He remained there in absolute silence for what seemed to observers like an eternity.

“An unusual burden accompanied me on my way to Warsaw,” Brandt said afterward. “Nowhere else had a people suffered as in Poland. The machine-like annihilation of Polish Jewry represented a heightening of bloodthirstiness that no one had held possible.”

He was deeply apprehensive about the visit and the balance he needed to walk — between German anger at his being too apologetic and, as he said, his “memory of the fight to the death of the Warsaw ghetto.” He said he felt he “had to do something to express the particularity of the commemoration at the ghetto monument. On the abyss of German history and carrying the burden of the millions who were murdered. I did what people do when words fail them.”

Not true. Brandt did what only a brave and thoughtful leader would do at such a moment.

Brandt also understood that bombastic leadership is merely a sad imitation of the real thing. The Donald Trumps and Silvio Berlusconis — and their fellow-bellowers in Canadian politics — can never aspire to true leadership because they fail the test of authenticity. One proof of authenticity in leadership is the willingness to take private risks, with no prospect of public acclaim, because that is the only way forward.

Fifteen years after that Warsaw moment, I witnessed that side of Brandt’s leadership in an opulent Kremlin office in front of the recently elevated Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. I was a staffer to Brandt in his role as president of the world’s largest federation of political parties, the Socialist International. He was heading a delegation of European leaders to meet the surprising new Soviet Communist Party general secretary. We didn’t know then that Gorbachev would change the world, but his style and candour in those meetings told everyone this was a transformational leader.

It was the time of Soviet dissidents, the refusniki, and of international campaigns on their behalf. Many progressives around the world would regularly pound the Soviets — partly as proof of their own anti-communist credentials, partly because it was popular to do so — and it always got great domestic media coverage. The British, the French and the Italians were the most cynical at this. They had begun to attack Brandt for not being more robust in his public critique of the Soviet Union. I began to worry about the impact of his silence. I should have known better.

The Donald Trumps and Silvio Berlusconis — and their fellow-bellowers in Canadian politics — can never aspire to true leadership because they fail the test of authenticity. One proof of authenticity in leadership is the willingness to take private risks … because that is the only way forward.

This was Nobel Peace Prize-winner Brandt, after all, the man who had devised the only successful strategy for dealing with the Soviets and their dreadful East German clones — if you judge success as winning freedom for those persecuted most viciously. His Ostpolitik strategy, greased by billions in German marks and covert American dollars, won the release of many Soviet and East German dissidents — simultaneously undermining both systems through the corruption of key officials, happy recipients of these secret payments. (It is a chapter of the Cold War that will not be written fully until more of those involved have passed on, so secret and illegal were some of the schemes.)

As the nervous political staffer, I was increasingly insistent as the visit to the Soviet Union entered its final hours that Brandt should offer a crumb of criticism to the media about the dissidents. To my final plea, Brandt looked at me dismissively and simply said, “Watch!”

Sulkily, I did — until the closing minutes of the final meeting with Gorbachev. Brandt rose, crossed the room and shook the Soviet leader’s hand, for an uncomfortably long time. I had glimpsed his hand as it came out his pocket; I was stunned. Brandt had palmed a tiny envelope.

As he turned to leave, he said quietly, “Sir, it would do me a great honour if you were to inquire about some of the names on that list.” Three months later, several of the dissidents were quietly released. Brandt never mentioned his action and was never credited for it. And I was grateful once again for my schooling at the feet of this incredible leader.

Improbable as it may seem to his critics, John Baird is another international player who understands the difference between public declamation and private entreaty. He has made similar efforts on behalf of today’s refusniki, the oppressed gay men and women in Russia and the Middle East. But he understands that it’s a subject that he cannot discuss and still hope to be useful to them.

So, whither Canada in the business and governmental leadership stakes? We have had strong, courageous prime ministers, both of the high profile/big vision type and those whose successes were more often offstage. We have had Canadian corporate and trade union leaders who were indisputably best in class.

Sadly, however, in every field, many of those Canadian leaders work on behalf of organizations and companies based elsewhere. Two Canadians, Lynn Williams and Leo Gerard, spent much of their careers running one of the largest and most respected international unions, the United Steelworkers Union in the U.S. Several Canadians play key roles running Silicon Valley firms. Some of our best academics lead American and Asian institutions.

Our run of national leaders — from Lester Pearson and Tommy Douglas, to Ed Broadbent, Bob Stanfield and Pierre Trudeau, to Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien — has been impressive. We have had premiers of world statesman-level competence and skill in Peter Lougheed, Allan Blakeney and Bill Davis. Today, not many Canadians outside Saskatchewan know of the skill and potential of Brad Wall — a great premier in a province that has had more than its share of greats — but they will.

The seminal leader of the advertising business in the post-war era, David Ogilvy — founder of the agency that still bears his name in 120 countries — liked to say that good clients create good agencies. He might have added that great clients demand grand ideas well-executed.

Perhaps the same is true of democratic leadership: Voters with high expectations, who demand big change and big solutions to critical problems, are likely to get better leadership than those who accept the trivial or the insultingly picayune (see, for a sorry example, changing the tax code to reward gym memberships).

We’ve gotten used, in the past seven years, to government by small change — the policy shifts delivered in small packages to small voter demographics. What a shock it would be to most Canadians to return to the scale of vision employed by a Pearson, a Trudeau or a Mulroney.

It can happen — but not until we demand more of the people we elect.

Robin V. Sears is a principal of the Earnscliffe Strategy Group. He was national director of the NDP during the Broadbent years, and worked on the staff of former West German chancellor Willy Brandt at the Socialist International. [email protected]

This article appeared originally in Policy, Canada’s magazine of politics and public policy.

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